Effects of another person’s fair treatment on one’s own emotions and behaviors: The moderating role of how much the other cares for you

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Abstract

This research examined whether the extent of fair treatment of another affects one’s own reactions and whether helpful and supportive behavior from this other towards oneself moderates this impact. We predicted fair treatment of the other would affect the participant’s own emotions and behaviors with respect to a common task, but only if this other was willing to give help and support. In addition, we expected that positive or negative emotions would underlie, respectively, a participant’s willingness to cooperate or their willingness to leave the task. Results from a scenario experiment, a cross-sectional survey, and a laboratory experiment supported our predictions. We conclude that how fairly another is treated matters in its effects on one’s emotional and behavioral reactions and that procedural justice for others can also be considered important organizational information in shaping one’s own feelings and actions for employees.

Introduction

By now an impressive amount of evidence indicates that within groups and organizations, procedural justice exerts powerful influences on a variety of outcomes, such as emotions and behavior (for a meta-analytic review, see Colquitt, Conlon, Wesson, Porter, & Ng, 2001). Procedural justice refers to authorities’ use of correct and fair procedures when making decisions and allocating outcomes (Leventhal, 1980, Thibaut and Walker, 1975); its relative importance has been demonstrated by research indicating how procedural justice interacts with other types of justice (e.g., Skarlicki & Folger, 1997), and how under certain situations it may exert even more powerful effects than outcomes do (e.g., Greenberg, 1996, Tyler, 1994). To date, however, most procedural justice research has been mainly focused on how people evaluate and process their own fairness experiences. In fact, this observation motivated Kray and Lind (2002, p. 906) to note that “with a few notable exceptions, the study of perceived justice has been a ‘first-person’ undertaking.”

Thus, although we know a great deal about the reasons why people personally perceive procedures as either fair or unfair, much less attention has been paid to the issue of whether or not people’s emotions and behaviors are shaped by the fairness experiences of others (e.g., colleagues or team members). An exception is research focused on how third parties react to justice (Folger, 2001). There are the empirical findings of Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler (1986) and subsequently Turillo, Folger, Lavelle, Umphress, and Gee (2002), who showed that individuals will sacrifice even their own resources to punish someone who has been unfair to another; these findings motivated recent work on, for example, the moral dimension of justice (e.g., Cropanzano & Rupp, 2002), which has found that people do seem consider the justice experiences of others. However, as mentioned before, little research has explored this issue in the realm of procedural justice and has not yet identified the circumstances under which these effects are most likely to emerge.

Therefore, here we focused on circumstances under which people’s own reactions are most likely to be influenced by how fair the treatment of another person is. In doing this, we explicitly investigated two types of reactions that have been identified and documented as important in the procedural justice literature, but that have received much less attention in studies of how people react, both emotionally and behaviorally, to the fairness experiences of others. Specifically, we examined how much the helping behavior of another affects a person’s incorporation of fair or unfair treatment of this other in regulating their own emotional and behavioral reactions toward the enacting authority.

Social exchange theory (e.g., Blau, 1964) is often used as a common lens for viewing and conducting justice research, which explains at least partly why many justice researchers have mainly examined how individuals personally experience the fairness of treatment. Within this framework, relationships between followers and authorities are seen as exchanges in which a follower reciprocates a positive personal outcome (e.g., higher salary) by giving positive outcomes to the other party, such as granting power and legitimacy. As a result, researchers were and have been interested in how people evaluate and process their own fairness experiences (see Tyler, Boeckmann, Smith, and Huo, 1997, for an overview).

However, in organizations, people often acquire information from others; therefore, it often is the case that justice information and its effects on the enacting authorities are based on information other than a person’s own fairness experiences (cf. van den Bos, Lind, Vermunt, & Wilke, 1997). Thus, people are subject to social influences and therefore often engage in social comparisons to construct reality and decide action (Festinger, 1954). This notion of social comparison has heavily influenced distributive justice theories such as equity theory (Adams, 1965) and relative deprivation theory (Crosby, 1976).

More recently, however, justice theories such as referent cognitions theory (Folger, 1986) and its successor, fairness theory (Folger & Cropanzano, 2001), have formed the bases of investigations into the role that social comparisons play in accounting for procedural justice effects. As a result, social and organizational justice research has gradually turned to examining this social influence component in studies of procedural justice (Ambrose et al., 1991, Brockner and Greenberg, 1990, Brockner et al., 1994, Kray and Lind, 2002, Lamertz, 2002, Lind et al., 1998) and interactions between procedures and outcomes (Grienberger, Rutte, & van Knippenberg, 1997). Many of these studies, however, failed to reveal strong supportive evidence for the effect of others’ justice experiences.

Only a limited number of studies have demonstrated that people under certain circumstances might take into account the justice experiences of others in shaping their own reactions toward the enacting authority. Lind et al. (1998) showed that people displayed a strong tendency to use their own experiences to make inferences about the treatment of others, suggesting that personal experience frequently serves as the most important reference point in evaluating procedural justice. Moreover qualified this conclusion by demonstrating that when people do not personally experience any injustice, they do not attend to the treatment of others; however, if they were treated unjustly themselves, they are affected by unjust treatment of others. Further, van den Bos and Lind (2001) showed that a person’s reaction was particularly influenced by social reports of another’s having received treatment similar to their own, either fair or unfair. As a result, van den Bos and Lind (2001, p. 1333) concluded that “Other-oriented justice effects (…) appear to be every bit as strong as were our self-oriented justice effects”; an observation that recently has received further support from Colquitt’s (2004) findings that in teams, the justice experiences of others influence a person’s reactions in the context of how fairly they themselves are treated.

It seems, therefore, to be the case that under specific circumstances, the reactions of people toward the enacting authority are influenced by information about how fairly the other is treated. Indeed, the fact that these effects have not been consistent in studies conducted to date suggests that specific situations that facilitate the emergence of these effects need to be identified (note that the deonance model suggests that people may care about other’s justice regardless of situation, although it is not clear which ultimate goal underlies such moral virtue orientation; see Gillespie and Greenberg, 2005, for a critical analysis). However, to date, little experimental research has demonstrated an interaction of social situation and influence of other’s procedural justice experiences on personal reactions. For example, in work settings, people do not always have similar relationships (i.e., some may be good, others may be less good); it may be that the type of relationship one has with these others influences whether one actually cares about how fairly these others are treated (Brockner, Grover, Thomas, & Dewitt, 1987). From this perspective, we assume that events occurring during social interaction between oneself and another, and consequently enhancing the commitment one develops towards the other, will moderate the influence on one’s own reactions of how fairly the other is treated. We argue that in work settings, people generally build up relationships in which reciprocity and commitment towards one another play an important role (Gouldner, 1960). Therefore, information about the willingness or unwillingness of the other to provide help and support to oneself (i.e., the actor) may constitute an important variable; this variable may moderate the effect of the procedural justice the other experiences on one’s own behavioral and emotional reactions toward the enacting authority. We will refer to this moderating variable as “the Other’s concern for the actor.”

Previous research has already found that the effectiveness of procedural justice may hinge on variables related to the type of relationship and degree of commitment and concern one has with the group or the enacting authority. For example, Brockner, Tyler, and Cooper-Schneider (1992) showed that under circumstances in which people attached greater psychological concern to their relationship with the other party, they were more likely to be influenced by the other party’s level of procedural justice. Also, Kwong and Leung (2002, study 2) demonstrated that procedural justice (as a function of distributive justice) influenced people’s reactions, particularly when they attached great importance to their relationship with the organization. However, the possibility that the influence of the other’s procedural justice experiences may depend on relational aspects between self and this other has received hardly any attention. Only recently, Colquitt (2004) has demonstrated that the effect of others’ procedural justice experiences (in combination with one’s own procedural justice experiences) influences one’s own reactions, particularly in teams that are highly interdependent in their tasks (i.e., interdependence can also be seen as a situation that induces a need for reciprocity and help). The present study therefore focuses on the hypothesis that the influence of treatment of the other on one’s own reactions toward the enacting authority will be contingent on how this other shows his or her concern toward the actor.1 One way others express their concern for the actor is by displaying helpful and supportive behavior.

People within groups and organizations often request favors and support from their colleagues, for example when they are under time pressure or when they lack the necessary skills to perform a task (Flynn & Brockner, 2003). Responding in a positive manner to such requests signals concern from the other toward the actor. As a matter of fact, giving support and help to another has positive effects on the level of commitment one feels in his or her relationship with the other (Blau, 1964) and increases trust in and perceptions of concern for the other (Kramer & Tyler, 1996). Consequently, if people show strong commitment towards the other because the other has helped or supported them, then the experiences of the other will also be taken more into account. Indeed, research on helping and supporting behavior has shown that displaying such behaviors of concern generally instills a certain sense of reciprocity that may take different forms, such as increased liking, gratitude, attributions of benign intentions, and important to the present paper, greater attention to and interest in the other (e.g., Clark, 1991, Greenberg and Frisch, 1972, McCullough et al., 2001). Thus, research has shown that quite often, receivers are positive and more socially interested in the one displaying helpful and supportive behavior (e.g., Nadler, 1991). In a similar vein, in the present paper we argue that people receiving help and support from their colleague will be more likely to take into account how fairly that colleague is treated.

Thus far, some evidence exists that others’ procedural justice experiences also affect one’s own reactions, but under which circumstances this happens is unclear. Therefore, in the present research, we suggest that how fairly the other is treated will affect one’s own reactions toward the party enacting the procedure, particularly when the other has been supportive and helpful in the past toward oneself. This specific prediction presents an instrumental perspective: it assumes that in the absence of support from the other, the level of an authority’s fairness toward the other will have no influence on one’s reactions to this authority. At first sight, this prediction seems at odds with the research of Turillo et al. (2002), which showed that people may react negatively toward (i.e., punish) an unfair authority or perpetrator, even when they do not feel related or affiliated with the victim; a finding consistent with the deontic model that assumes that people care about justice out of respect for humanity and that instrumental or self-interest concerns do not matter. However, in light of this observation, it is necessary to point out that recently, Gillespie and Greenberg (2005) convincingly reasoned that in effect, all existing justice models (including the deontic one) are primarily self-interested or instrumental in nature. These authors suggest that people care about justice because it serves the higher, selfish goal of satisfying the need to belong (see De Cremer and Blader, in press for empirical evidence); in addition, they suggest that because of the desire to satisfy that need, people sometimes also engage in actions that are viewed as adhering to moral principles. Thus, moral motives (as advocated by the deontic model) appear also to be covered by the scientific concept of self-interest, leading to the conclusion that what we predict here does not contradict justice theories and research focusing on moral concerns.

Further, the present study is the first to focus on the interactive effects of the other’s procedural justice and the other’s concern for the actor. Finally, we will also focus on types of reactions that have received less attention in the research literature, such as how one reacts to the justice of the treatment of others—one’s own emotions and behavior. The use of these dependent measures is also interesting in light of Selancik and Pfeffer’s (1978) argument that co-workers’ attitudes should be seen as important because they influence the formation of one’s own attitudes. If so, will they also play a role in the formation of one’s own emotional and behavioral reactions toward the enacting authority?

Recently, justice research has started to devote more attention to emotional reactions. This interest in emotions has been motivated by claims such as the argument of Weiss, Suckow, and Cropanzano (1999, p. 786) that “the relative lack of empirical research assessing emotional reactions to conditions of unfairness is a serious omission,” and Bies and Tripp’s (2002) suggestion that “to understand justice in organizations, one must understand the events that arouse the sense of injustice—the emotions of injustice” (pp. 204–205). Regarding research on people’s reactions towards the procedural justice experiences of others, van den Bos and Lind (2001) even noted that future research in this tradition needs to include measures of affect, something that they state has yet to be done. This latter point particularly deserves further investigation because recent research indeed indicates that social influences affect emotions. For example, others influence one’s formation and regulation of emotions because one wishes to avoid being evaluated negatively by those others and wishes to please or protect others from bad treatment (e.g., Erber and Erber, 2000, Fisher et al., 2004). Thus, it is clear that to advance our knowledge of the effects of the fairness experiences of others, one’s own emotional experiences have to be assessed, as well.

To date, justice research examining the role of emotions has mainly shown that procedural justice variations elicit anger-related emotional reactions (Folger and Cropanzano, 1998, Mikula et al., 1998). Indeed, Mikula et al. (1998, p. 781), for example, state that “in about 50% of cases a member of the anger family is likely to be elicited.” Further, Folger, Cropanzano, and Goldman (2005) also note that if parties are perceived as being unjust, hostile reactions are elicited, a process that they referred to as “deontic anger.” However, other recent evidence indicates that procedural justice also has an effect on people’s positive emotional reactions, such as happiness and satisfaction (e.g., De Cremer, 2004, van den Bos and Spruijt, 2002). This finding is not surprising because relationship research shows that a more positive effect will occur when relational issues like belonging and closeness play a role (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Thus, the literature on emotions has convincingly argued that to fully understand the effect of social cues on emotions, positive emotions need to be assessed in addition to negative emotions (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988). In the present research, we use both positive and negative emotions as dependent measures.

Moreover, our desire to examine effects on people’s behavioral reactions motivated our decision to focus on emotional reactions. Both positive and negative emotions play different roles in self-regulatory processes that guide people’s actions (see Tice, Baumeister, & Zhang, 2004). Positive emotions facilitate self-regulatory actions and thus enable positive and constructive behaviors, such as cooperation. Research has shown that positive emotions play an important role in the formation and maintenance of social relationships because they facilitate such behaviors (Shiota, Campos, Keltner, & Hertenstein, 2004). Evolutionary psychologists have even argued that positive emotions evolved to promote social relationships and constructive social behaviors (Buck, 1999). Further, negative emotions are believed to impair self-regulatory actions and thus negatively contribute to the maintenance of social relationships. Bies (1987), for example, argued that injustice evokes moral outrage (e.g., anger) that instigates negative reactions, violating the relationship. Thus, this type of emotion increases withdrawal tendencies in the context of social relationships.

As mentioned earlier, the second dependent measure of interest will be the participants’ own behavior. Recent meta-analytic evidence has shown that procedural justice shares moderate correlations with behavioral reactions (Colquitt et al., 2001, p. 434) Research has, for example, demonstrated that fair procedures influence to a moderate degree organizational citizenship behavior, withdrawal behavior, and negative reactions, such as employee theft and retaliatory actions (Dailey and Kirk, 1992, Greenberg, 1993, Moorman, 1991, Skarlicki and Folger, 1997). However, recently, Greenberg (2001, p. 254) argued that the justice literature is “hard-pressed to tell exactly what form a response might take,” suggesting that more systematic research is needed to examine how and when justice will affect behavioral reactions. Moreover, and very relevant to the present study with respect to the way fair treatment of others affects one’s own reactions, no experimentally based research has included behavioral reactions, with one exception (Colquitt, 2004). Therefore, in the present research we assessed two different types of behavior considered important to group and organizational viability: cooperation and withdrawal behavior (Ball et al., 1993, Smith et al., 1995). These two types of behaviors are interesting not only because they both affect people’s citizenship and group and organizational stability but also because cooperation is expected to arise from positive emotions and exit or withdrawal behavior from negative emotions, following an emotion-regulation perspective (Philippot & Feldman, 2004). With this approach, the present research will add to our understanding of how (in)justice affects people’s behavior, which we argue occurs via emotions (a possibility that Colquitt and Greenberg, 2003, also referred to in their review).

To summarize, based on the above, the following predictions can be made:

  • Hypothesis 1: Others’ procedural justice experiences will positively influence positive emotions and cooperation and negatively influence negative emotions and exit behavior, particularly when the other shows concerns for the actor. Thus, a two-way interaction between other’s procedural justice and other’s concern for the actor is predicted on the measures of positive or negative emotions and cooperation or exit.

  • Hypothesis 2: Positive emotions will mediate the two-way interaction effect on cooperation, and negative emotions will mediate the two-way interaction effect on exit behavior.

In the present research, we used two controlled experiments (Study 1 and Study 3) to establish clear causality when examining the above hypotheses (see van den Bos, 2001a). Because correlational research necessitates caution in making predictions about causal relationships (i.e., reverse causality may often provide a plausible alternative explanation for observed relationships), furthering research on the topic of others’ procedural justice effects requires that the hypotheses be tested experimentally. In addition, whether observations made in a controlled laboratory setting apply in organizational contexts will also need to be established.

For these reasons, we tested the main predictions in three different types of studies: a scenario experiment (Study 1), a field survey (Study 2), and a laboratory experiment (Study 3). The scenario experiment allowed us to draw conclusions concerning causality while maintaining a relatively high degree of everyday realism, whereas the field study allowed an investigation of the research questions with people in actual organizations. The laboratory experiment was designed to provide an experimental replication of Studies 1 and 2 with high internal validity. This combination of methods allowed us to benefit from the strengths of each method and to compensate the weaknesses of each method with the strengths of the other methods (Dipboye, 1990, De Cremer and Van Knippenberg, 2002).

Section snippets

Participants and design

A total of 108 Belgian undergraduate students at Ghent University (87 women and 21 men, average age = 19.15 years, SD = 0.87) participated voluntarily. They were randomly assigned to a 2 (Other’s procedural justice: voice vs. no voice) × 2 (Other’s concern for the actor: high vs. low) between-subjects factorial design. All materials were based on existing Dutch measures and were therefore administered in Dutch (both the Netherlands and Flemish parts of Belgium share the same language).

Procedure

Psychology

Discussion

As expected, the findings of Study 1 provide support for our line of reasoning: Other’s procedural justice experiences influenced participants’ positive emotions, negative emotions, and cooperation significantly, but only if the other person was willing to provide support and help to the participant in an earlier phase. Moreover, the findings also revealed that positive emotions (and not negative emotions) mediated the interaction effect on cooperation. Finally, it is also interesting to note

Study 2

The results of Study 1 are important because the identified interaction is a novel finding and the experimental setup of Study 1 allowed us to establish causality in this relationship. Even so, an obvious question is whether these effects may also be observed in field settings. Study 2 was designed to address that question.

This time we focused again on a behavioral measure of cooperation, referred to as organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). OCB refers to activities that go beyond job

Discussion

In line with predictions, the findings of Study 2 show that other’s procedural justice influenced employees’ positive emotions (assessed in terms of affective commitment) and willingness to engage in OCB, but particularly so when the Other’s concern for the actor was high. Also, affective commitment was found to mediate the interaction effect on OCB. Taken together, although Study 2 might be faulted for its cross-sectional mono-method design and Study 1 for its scenario character, in

Study 3

Although the results of the first two studies are convincing and in line with our predictions, we needed to replicate these findings in a controlled setting before drawing strong conclusions. Indeed, Study 1 made use of a scenario in which participants were asked to imagine a relevant work situation. One might wonder whether similar results would be obtained when participants are involved in an actual working task where an actual partner receives (un)just treatment. Therefore, in Study 3, an

Discussion

As expected, the findings of Study 3 provided further support for the hypothesis that others’ procedural justice affects people’s own reactions only if the Other showed concern toward the actor. The fact that this study was conducted within a laboratory context also adds to the internal validity of the present findings. In addition, Study 3 also showed that the interaction effect on cooperation was mediated by positive emotions, whereas the interaction effect on termination of the task was

General discussion

Taken together, the present findings support the predictions. Across three studies, we found that the level of fairness with which someone else is treated affects a range of people’s own reactions, including emotions and behavior, particularly as a function of the others’ willingness to provide help and support. In addition, the analyses also provided insights into the underlying mechanisms of the interactive effect of others’ procedural justice experiences and others’ concern for the actor on

Conclusion

Prior procedural justice research has generally adopted a focus on personal justice experiences, and little attention has been devoted to understanding the conditions under which others’ procedural justice experiences matter in affecting one’s own reactions (see also Kray & Lind, 2002). The present research attempts to answer this question. The findings show that people’s own emotions and behaviors are more strongly influenced by other’s procedural justice experiences when the other has shown

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    This research was supported by a fellowship from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO, Grant No. 016-005.019), awarded to the first author. The authors wish to thank Bridget Malit and Ilse Cornelis for their comments on a previous draft of the paper.

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